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Tonight isn’t the first time I’ve come out here to lay on a lounger at the bottom of our garden, pondering her incredible gift. I don’t usually ponder for too long because Janie doesn’t like to sleep and will probably wake up soon.

I’m drifting off to sleep when Aerin slips onto the lounger beside me.

Smiling, I slide my arm around my beautiful mate and kiss the top of her head. “Ah, looking to escape the terror inside?”

Aerin laughs. “Janie is not a terror.” She pauses. “When she’s asleep. When she’s awake… well.”

Since Janie was born, I don’t like to stray far from the house, or Aerin, for that matter.

But once I’d rocked Janie back to sleep after feeding her from the bottle, something about the way the moonlight drifted over the garden drew me outside.

It’s not the same one Aerin and I have fallen out of more times than I could count.

Bennett’s present to us, after Janie was born, was a double lounger, not made out of plastic, big enough, in his words, “For you, Aerin, and Janie to not kill yourselves rolling out of on a regular basis.”

It’s the best present I’ve ever had.

“Are you falling asleep?” Aerin whispers.

“Probably.”

She yawns. “Me too. Any time there’s silence and my exhausted brain just shuts down.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

We fall silent.

“Are you waiting for the crying to start back up again?” I ask.

She slips her hand under my shirt, resting it over my heart. I hum in pleasure. “Yep. You?”

“I never stop. I love her, but I’m desperately hoping we’re reaching the point she’ll sleep through the night.”

We’re still planning to make the big move to an old farm outside of town, to build a home for everyone, but I’ve handed over most of the organization for that to the rest of the pack. My sleep deprived brain can’t handle a project that scale. Not yet.

“And just when we’ve gotten her settled, we’ll be thinking of doing this again,” I say.

“Yeah,” she breathes. “Crazy, huh?”

I give her a gentle squeeze.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the future. That’s when we’ve not been falling asleep between feedings. Part of those conversations has included Shane, Aerin’s former mate. And about whether we are going to tell Janie about her biological father.

Aerin had been resistant to the idea. I had as well. But the more we’ve thought about it, and the more we’ve talked about it with Adela, we’ve come to the decision that it’s something Janie needs to know.

Whether we like it or not, Shane is a part of Janie’s past. So when she’s older, we’ll tell her about Shane. The last thing he did was die protecting Aerin, even if he did more wrong than right.

“Mack?”

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to move to the farm before we have our second one,” she says.

I grin down at her. “So it’s easier to find babysitters?”

She laughs. “No. Just the thought of moving after sounds exhausting. Do you think we’ll be able to?”

I consider it.

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